Creativity and the curriculum: educational apartheid in 21st Century England, a European outlier?

Abstract

In many European societies, arts education and culture play a central role in their education systems. In England, the situation is very different. There, for the last two decades, the state has progressively marginalised the role of the arts in the public education system in the belief that the ‘market’ does not value the arts. However, England also has a strong relatively autonomous private education system financed directly by parental fees. This paper explores the extent to which the top private schools have diverged from this process of marginalisation. The findings suggest that these top private schools have invested more in the arts, which have subsequently come to play an increasingly important role in the education they provide. One consequence is that we have witnessed the emergence of two ‘systems’ of education in England, which pose a significant challenge for cultural policy.